Too Fat for China
Live at Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2022
A Comic Look at the Agony of Adoption
Too Fat for China
Written by and featuring Phoebe Potts
TOO FAT FOR CHINA follows Phoebe Potts, comic storyteller and professional Jew, as she tries, fails and eventually succeeds to adopt a baby. After a US adoption goes horribly wrong, Potts finds herself surprised, disgusted and ultimately resigned to the role she plays as a middle class white lady in the business of adopting babies in the US and internationally. Potts’ tragicomic journey is about looking for more, more love, more life and more family and will do anything to get it, including having her morals and values fold in on themselves.
Potts comes to the stage armed with her drawing sketchbook and a team of two-dimensional characters direct from the newsroom in her head. After a wave of sold out performances at Gloucester Stage Company, The Modern Theatre of Suffolk, and Watertown’s Mosesian Center for the Arts, Phoebe makes her way to the Historic Fringe Festival of Scotland.
About the Creator and Performer
Phoebe Potts
A native of Brooklyn, where everyone was indignant before breakfast, Potts learned to tell stories to get her family to like her and to understand thorny issues. In Too Fat for China, Potts uses humor and honesty to tell the irreverent story of the terrible things she did for love.
Her comedic theater performance debuted on National Adoption Day, Nov. 23, 2019 and is a sequel to Potts’ graphic memoir, Good Eggs (Harper, 2010), which charts her travails with infertility and the endless rounds of treatments and miscarriages she and her husband endured. Roz Chast, the New Yorker cartoonist, called Potts’ memoir “sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always honest, intelligent, and completely involving.”
Potts’ day job is teaching and learning Torah with children and adults through “Visual Midrash.” Potts designed this class to help students who come from families who identify as Jewish to find a connection to the ancient texts for themselves by asking lotsa questions, and making art about the answers.
Potts lives with her family in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Critical Praise for TOO FAT FOR CHINA
“Funny and very very smart. I loved it!”
“Delivered with humor and grace!”
“Enjoyable, fascinating, riotous and raw.”